Spring Forward???? Fall Back??? Daylight Saving Time…Here To Stay

On Sunday, most Americans will wake up only to realize they’ve lost an hour of their weekend to daylight saving time, hey everything comes with a cost…. the price we pay for eight months of well-lit evenings.

Unless you live in Arizona or Hawaii, who say….”We don’t need no stinkin daylight saving time”. These states don’t observe daylight saving, you’re probably used to this routine by now. But the history of daylight saving time has been anything but peaceful, from its first wartime introduction to its ongoing controversy today.

Ben Franklin gets credit for thinking up the idea of daylight saving time, albeit with his trademark wit. As ambassador to Paris, Franklin wrote a letter to the Journal of Paris in 1784 of his “discovery” that the sun gives light as soon as it rises, and needling Parisians for their night-owl, candle-burning ways.

In 1916, with World War I ratcheting up, Germany put itself on daylight saving time to save energy for the war effort. Britain followed a month later.

When the United States got involved in the war in 1918, they too instituted daylight saving time. President Woodrow Wilson even wanted to keep the new system after the war ended. But at the time, the country was mostly rural. Farmers hated the time change, because their jobs were dependent on the sun, and daylight saving time put them out of sync with the city people who sold them goods and bought their products. Congress repealed daylight saving time, Wilson vetoed the repeal, and Congress promptly overrode his veto, a fairly rare occurrence.

When World War II hit, daylight saving time returned… again to save energy for the war effort. The U.S. instituted daylight saving time less than a month after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor… with America’s increasingly industrialized population did not like losing their post-work daylight after the war ended. So when the national law requiring the time switch was repealed, some towns stuck with daylight saving.

It was chaos. A trip from one town to the next could take riders through many different time changes. At one point, the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul were on different clocks, creating confusion for workers who lived in one city and commuted to the other.

This every-town-for-itself system couldn’t last long. In 1966, Congress passed the Uniform Time act of 1966, specifying that states didn’t have to get on the daylight saving bandwagon, but that if they did, the whole state had to comply. And the federal government would determine the days of “springing forward” and “falling back,” the law stated, eliminating the problem of towns and cities setting their own daylight saving dates.

Since that time, Congress has expanded the length of daylight saving time three times, once in the 1970s during the country’s energy crisis, once in the 1980s, when April got brought under the daylight saving umbrella, and finally in 2007. Today, daylight saving time encompasses March into November.

So sorry for your loss this Sunday….but hey you will get that hour back in the spring.